Chicago Tap Theatre takes music as its guide

Mark Yonally and musician Kurt Schweitz in "Unleash the Beats."

Chicago Tap Theatre

Chicago Tap Theatre

Laura MolzahnSpecial to the Tribune

Industrial, synth-pop, rave, trip-hop: All are music to the ears of Chicago Tap Theatre artistic director Mark Yonally. The reason? When he was coming of age in a homogenous Kansas City, Mo., suburb in the late '80s, an underage club proved a godsend. "I was into theater and dance, and it was a safe place to be different — and even rewarded for that. Why my parents let me stay out till two in the morning at 15, I have no idea, but I'm so grateful."

Chicago Tap, always the innovator, has been tap-dancing to recorded electronic music for years. But for the first time — in "Unleash the Beats" on Saturday at the Athenaeum — the eight-member troupe dances such a program to live music: A six-piece band performs music director Kurt Schweitz's customized arrangements of electronic dance tunes.

Best known as a jazz bassist who's played with the likes of Willie Pickens at the Green Mill, Schweitz has been working closely with Yonally and company member Rich Ashworth, who has two premieres and a collaboration on this program, to create arrangements of songs by artists from Nine Inch Nails to Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin and Daft Punk.

Wanting to give Schweitz "more of an artistic voice," Yonally urged him to suggest any tunes he liked.

Be careful what you wish for. When Schweitz brought Yonally his arrangement of The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights," it was so late in the process that the choreographer almost turned him down, song unheard. "He was like, 'Just listen to this thing I created,'" Yonally says. "I was so moved by it, I thought it was so beautiful, I was like, 'I'm going to have to create a dance to this because people need to hear it.'"

The result, also called "Such Great Heights," will be the troupe's first guided improvisation: Each dancer is given a set number of bars and a sense of where to be when. "It has a strong concept," Yonally says, "of people passing each other on the street, and the impact you can have in a brief encounter — somebody smiles at you, and that can change your day."

Ashworth, who joined Chicago Tap five years ago and has been rehearsal director for three, says that his experience busking — he tap-danced in a New York City subway station for extra cash — helps with improvisation. "When you're performing on the street, anything can happen," he says. "That helps with thinking on your feet, gives you the mentality that it's all just part of the show."

A self-described rambunctious child who believes his parents put him in dance and gymnastics because they needed a break, Ashworth says he was immediately drawn to tap. "You're wearing these huge noisemakers on your feet. At 2 or 3 years old, it's so exciting."

Hip-hop is Ashworth's second love. "Ballet really wasn't my cup of tea," he says. "But tap and hip-hop — being social, being wowed, being very expressive — I clung to those."

Hip-hop enters into "conSTRAIN," his collaboration with Yonally: Ashworth choreographed the upper body, Yonally the lower. Set to Suzanne Vega songs, it's a piece in which the dancers represent "bloodborne pathogens, tethered together with red and blue elastic tubes."

Ashworth says that hip-hop plays a role in his "goofy" men's dance, while his women's piece, set to Koop's "Jellyfishes," is "more serious and subtle."

Most pop music today is electronic to some degree, of course. But in "Unleash the Beats," Yonally says, Chicago Tap is avoiding electronic manipulation as much as possible: "There's no synthesizer, no drum machine. The drums are live, and it's live electric guitar. So what the audience is seeing is what the musicians are doing."

The biggest issue in tap-dancing to electronic music, Yonally adds, is that it can be loud. "Amplification becomes important to the tap artist. We want to make sure we're heard, so we definitely invest in the audio." Either way, expect lots of power out of what he calls "a really strong show."